Multiview Video Coding (MVC) is an amendment to the H.264/Moving Picture Experts Group-4 (MPEG-4) Advanced Video Coding (AVC) video compression standard developed with joint efforts by MPEG/Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) that enables encoding on a video stream of frame sequences captured contemporaneously from two or more cameras. MVC can be used for encoding stereoscopic video, free viewpoint television, multi-view three-dimensional (3D) video, etc. An MVC stream is generally backward compatible with H.264/AVC, which allows older devices and software to decode multiview video coded streams by employing only content associated with a first camera view and ignoring any additional information associated with other camera views.
As an overview, multiview video can capture a scene from two or more viewpoints resulting in high levels of statistical dependencies between groups of pictures (GOPs) from each view. Similarly, within a GOP for a single view, there can be high levels of intra-view statistical dependencies that would be common for coding a conventional single camera stream. Typically, a frame from a first camera view can be predicted not only from temporally related frames from the same camera view, but also from the frames of neighboring cameras with alternate camera views. This can be commonly referred to as prediction from a matrix of pictures (MOP). The MOP is commonly ‘n’ views by ‘k’ frames, e.g., each group of pictures has k frames contemporaneously captured by n camera views resulting in n groups of pictures. As an example, a 3×30 MOP can have three GOPs, wherein each GOP has 30 frames. As such, MVC is commonly associated with large quantities of data and improvements in compression techniques and codecs would therefore help to reduce the bandwidth requirements for transmitting a coded video stream.